They depicted anything from young women in kimono posing for coming-of-age portraits and cake-cutting newly weds to a high school baseball team and a radiant mother cradling a new-born baby. What they all shared in common were personal slices of happiness — private celebrations of everyday life that had previously occupied very personal spaces, but were now on display in a massive open-air gallery.

Through the lenses of the photographers who ventured into Tohoku in the aftermath of the quake and tsunami, these sunny snapshots — now muddied, torn and tossed around like confetti from some long-abandoned revelry — took on a distinctly somber tone. Where were those smiling, peace-sign toting teenagers now? Or the slightly disheveled business colleagues, grinning red-faced under the cherry blossoms?

In some cases, weeks of searching uncovered a frequently tragic answer. For many of the photographers who documented the disasters, however, this was the closest they would get to an image of how this coastal region in northeastern Japan had once looked and how its people had lived.

The other objects they photographed were little more than testament to the power of nature, or documents that would remind future generations of the travails of their forefathers, both as survivors and re-builders. In the case of the Fukushima nuclear accident, they served as records of villages and towns still physically standing but effectively as obliterated as those places along the coast that had been swept away by the marauding waves.

Five years on and much of the landscape in the devastated region has changed beyond recognition once more. In Iwate and Miyagi prefectures, post-tsunami landmarks such as toppled buildings and washed-up cargo vessels have disappeared almost as rapidly as those that are now obscured, or have been replaced, by the ever-growing mountains of plastic bags filled with radioactive waste and land-reclaiming vegetation in Fukushima.

Yet, while some displaced residents also have changed landscapes — many with new pastures hundreds of kilometers away — tens of thousands more remain in limbo.

“I have given up hope of ever returning home,” says one elderly evacuee from Namie, a town near the crippled nuclear plant, who has lived in temporary housing in the city of Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, for almost four of the past five years. “It seems the rest of the country has moved on, but we are going nowhere.”

Yuko Kusano of Sendai-based nonprofit organization Miyagi Jo-Net, which has provided support for displaced women since March 2011, says many others, especially the elderly, feel the same — that they have been “forgotten, or abandoned.”

Some photographers who have worked in the region over the past five years are determined to make sure this never happens, documenting progress, or lack of it, and giving hope to the people who they first met in those photos that littered the post-tsunami landscape.

To mark the upcoming fifth anniversary of the March 2011 disaster, The Japan Times interviewed three photographers who have expressed diverse, but nonetheless revealing, viewpoints.

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Bon Ishikawa

Bon Ishikawa offers a unique perspective of the Tohoku disasters. Known for documenting the shrine removals at Ise Grand Shrine for more than 30 years as well as his aerial views of Earth, Ishikawa first photographed the devastated region from a Cessna aircraft that he chartered in Tokyo.

“When I flew over Kesennuma (in Miyagi Prefecture), I could just make out the faint sight of people through the smoke that was billowing up from the flooded landscape and felt as though I was looking down on hell,” says Ishikawa, 56, who began his career with the Agence France-Press news agency before turning freelance in 1990. “I couldn’t help wondering what those people were going through.”

Within a matter of hours he would find out. Having returned to his home in the capital, Ishikawa collected his motorbike and headed back up to the devastated region. The pain and suffering he found there made him determined to show the disasters from the victims’ perspectives.

“Even if we look at photos of war or the atomic bombings, for example, with time our memory of events tends to fade,” he says. “I thought that if I could somehow capture the feelings and struggles of the people then I would be able to convey the sheer terror of a tsunami for future generations.”

Later, Ishikawa had fears of his own to contend with. When reactor 3 at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power facility exploded on March 15, he was working nearby. Shortly after, it began to rain and he started to worry about radiation poisoning; he was still moving around the region on his motorbike.

“I was soaked through with black rain,” says Ishikawa, who later burned his clothes, showered and went through radiation screening in Iwaki City. “The readings caused a real commotion at the screening. My camera bag, camera straps and memory cards were confiscated … though somehow my cameras were OK. I am sure that I, too, must have been irradiated.”

Nonetheless, he carried on working, even though this “intense” incident made him question the wisdom of nuclear power in a disaster-prone country such as Japan.

“As a person who has gone through such a first-hand experience, I am amazed that despite what happened at Fukushima, despite the continuing nuclear waste issue, nuclear power plants are being switched back on,” says Ishikawa, whose wife developed thyroid cancer 12 months after the disasters, although he is unsure it was related to the nuclear accident. “I truly wonder where human wisdom lies when you can restart nuclear plants after something so asinine as Fukushima.”

Over the days that followed, Ishikawa delivered emergency supplies to remote communities near Kesennuma. Later on, he worked with local schools in an attempt to mitigate post-traumatic stress among school children, both through photography and his dog, Jubey, who he has trained as a Frisbee dog.

“Child survivors didn’t talk about the disasters, but doctors said if they didn’t they may never completely get over it,” Ishikawa says. “I thought the positive power of photography could help. So I worked with them on photo projects that focused on the things and places they like, or things they want to convey. During break time, we would play Frisbee. Such interaction helped them relax and enabled me to work more effectively.”

Biography

Date of birth: January 1960
Place of birth: Oita Prefecture
Awards: Best photographer of the year, Photographic Society of Japan, 2012
Website: http://bonlamafa.wix.com/bon-ishikawa-photog

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James Whitlow Delano

American photojournalist James Whitlow Delano recently returned from the disaster zone where he had tried to revisit some of the places he had photographed in the aftermath of the disasters. Most he found, although the rapidly altering landscape made the job challenging.

“Five years on, they are making great progress but they are not there yet,” says Delano, who has called Japan home for over 20 years. “Rebuilding these towns … is a massive operation. And it’s really hit and miss — some places are doing better than others.”

Delano has shot photographic projects worldwide, many focusing on environmental issues and natural phenomena such as volcanoes. The Tohoku disasters had a more emotional impact on him, especially the Fukushima nuclear accident which was “harrowing for a child of the Cold War,” he says.

“Being a long-term resident and having family here I felt duty-bound to tell this story,” he says. “When you see news from around the world, it somehow seems as though affected people are in a never-changing state, which makes it hard to imagine what life was like for them in normal times. In this case, however, a few days before they were living just like you and me. … And it showed me that we are just one bad day away from being in their shoes.”

Consequently, he admits to feeling conflicted when working in the disaster zone and photographing people who had lost their homes and loved ones.

“There were photos I had to take to communicate what was going on,” he says. “I always apologized and explained to them after. I wanted people to understand. … But that was the worst time of their lives. It was tough.”

While he believes that much of the tsunami-hit zone will recover with time, he is less optimistic about communities that have been affected by radiation. On a recent assignment in Fukushima, in addition to the sprawling temporary storage facilities that can be found dotted around the prefecture, Delano noticed piles of tarpaulin-covered radioactive debris near to homes, even in the city of Fukushima.

“When I found out what they were, I saw them as a great metaphor for the silent menace that people have to live with up there,” he says. “I can’t imagine how anyone who has been to see Fukushima Prefecture could think anything about nuclear power is good.”

Despite the nuclear issue, Delano believes the “world-class beauty” found in Honshu’s northeastern region and the hard-working, stoic character of the Tohoku people could lead to much-needed development and innovation in the area.

“They didn’t lose everything,” he says. “Tohoku is still there. The culture and the spirit is very much still alive. A happy scenario could be that this sparks a renaissance.”

Biography

Date of birth: February 1960
Place of birth: Washington, U.S.
Awards: Alfred Eisenstaedt Award (from Columbia University and Life Magazine), Leica’s Oskar Barnack, Picture of the Year International
Website: www.jameswhitlowdelano.com

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Mayumi Suzuki

Large-format photographer Mayumi Suzuki’s work in Tohoku began when she uncovered a camera lens among the debris in Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture. Caked in mud, it had been half buried near a darkroom that was all that remained of an erstwhile photo studio and home.

Suzuki, who lives in Kanagawa Prefecture, recognized the lens immediately: It belonged to her father, Atsushi Sasaki, and the battered two-story building was the house in which she was born.

Although it had not been confirmed at the time, her father and mother both perished in the disasters. However, aided by a love of photography and a positivity she says she inherited from her father, Suzuki chose not to dwell on the past. Instead, she began to document the bravery of the survivors as they went about picking up the pieces of their lives.

“I found the lens and the darkroom, but there was nothing left of the neighboring homes and stores,” Suzuki recalls. “Even a large, concrete building nearby had been knocked on its side. Inside the darkroom, however, equipment such as the enlarger was still intact. Even the light bulb was unbroken. I felt this must be a message from my father. … I thought I have to start working.”

First, she created a studio-like set on the devastated land and began to take portraits of survivors — local store owners and their children, who, like Suzuki were heirs to the family business.

It was a theme she resolved to follow after discovering that her grandfather, who opened the seaside studio in 1930, had been forced to rebuild it three years later following another devastating tsunami that was triggered by the 1933 Sanriku Earthquake. Her father, too, had suffered a similar fate in the aftermath of another tsunami that hit the pretty coastal town in 1960.

“A disaster had struck each generation, but everyone decided to stay and rebuild,” says Suzuki, who says she had never considered carrying on her father’s work. “The reason is simple — Onagawa is a place that holds too much significance for them. It’s a place they love. This is why they chose to start again after March 11 and that’s what moved me the most. It’s why I wanted to document their endeavors for future generations.”

Onagawa’s recovery has been steady, and plans to raise the coastal land by 5 meters are yet to convene. Yet, there is a perceptiveness among the local people that is not always seen in other recovering towns, she says.

“In other places, there is a tendency to look back — to want to return to how things were,” says Suzuki, who was invited to show her work in New York a few months after the disasters. “In Onagawa, however, the future of the town is being shaped by people of my generation, but not even for us. We are shaping it for our children.”

More recently, Suzuki has started to reflect on the family photo studio and has commenced work on a new project that employs the mud-encrusted lens she found among the debris five years ago, which she had mistakenly believed was beyond repair.

“What I want to express through these images is the idea that my father’s spirit is alive, and that at night he appears and wanders around town,” she says. “The photos reflect how he would see it now five years on, or that he is still watching over me, … saying, ‘Make sure you do a good job of this.’ … So I am no longer creating just a record of recovery. Although I am the one who is taking the pictures, I see them from my father’s perspective and his spirit is always by my side.”

Biography

Date of birth: August 1977
Place of birth: Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture
Publications: “Onagawa, Sasaki Photo Studio — From March 11, 2011, and Beyond” (Ichiyosha)
Website: www.mayumisuzuki.jp

That was the beginning of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s long struggle to contain radioactive material spilling outside its damaged reactors, whose dangerous decommissioning will take decades to complete.

Five years on, Tepco has cleaned up some of the debris and decontaminated the site somewhat in an effort to improve the working conditions of the thousands of workers there.

But the reactor decommissioning is still in an early stage, delayed due in part to Tepco’s struggle to contain the tons of groundwater tainted with radioactive material on a daily basis.

“It’s difficult to say how far we have come with the decommissioning. But if the mountain (peak) is 100 percent, I think we have climbed about 10 percent,” Akira Ono, chief of the Fukushima No. 1 plant, said last month.

Progress has been made, albeit at a snail’s pace. About 1,500 spent and unused fuel assemblies were removed from a pool in the building housing the crippled reactor 4 in 2014 — a milestone in the decommissioning process. The next big step will be for Tepco to remove spent-fuel rods from the reactor 3 building in about two years.

Improving the workplace environment will also help speed up the process.

To cater to some 7,000 people who work at Fukushima No. 1 each day, Tepco has constructed a facility where they can rest and have hot meals.

The decontamination efforts at the plant has allowed workers to switch to half-face masks from full-faced ones that are uncomfortable and harder to speak through. Now, full-faced masks are only required when working at sites, such as near reactor buildings, where radiation levels are still high.

Securing enough workers is also a challenge for Tepco. But Ono played down the concern.

“The decommissioning task is a new business. There are many new things to develop for the work, so I think this is a business that has a future,” said Ono.

For now, the pressing task for Tepco is to reduce the increasing amount of radioactive water — groundwater flowing from the mountains into the damaged basements of the reactor buildings, resulting in contaminated water.

The basement floors of the buildings housing reactors 1, 2, 3 and 4 are flooded with radioactive water generated in the process of cooling the damaged reactors. The buildings apparently have cracks where groundwater finds its way in and mixes with the tainted water.

The issue has forced the utility to build an unprecedented underground ice wall to block groundwater going into the basements of the reactor buildings. The government-backed project, which cost ¥35 billion, involves encircling the buildings with the frozen wall by freezing the soil.

If it works, Tepco may be able to achieve its goal in stopping the leakage by 2020. The ice wall technology has been used in other construction projects, but the 1.5-km wall planned for the Fukushima plant is unprecedented.

“The increase of the contaminated water has been a major issue. Even though Tepco is now pumping groundwater from the wells . . . quite a lot . . . is still going into the reactor buildings. In that sense, the ice wall could be effective,” said Kiyoshi Takasaka, an adviser on nuclear issues to the Fukushima Prefectural Government.

At first, an estimated 400 tons of groundwater was being contaminated daily, but the amount has decreased to about 150 tons after Tepco started pumping out groundwater and discharged it into the sea after checking radiation levels. Because rainwater seeps into the ground and increases groundwater levels in and around the plant, Tepco has also paved many areas within the site to limit this.

But if the containment fails to go as planned, radioactive water may seep into the soil around the reactor buildings, further contaminating the environment.

To date, the tainted water has remained largely inside the reactor buildings because the water level has been lower than the groundwater level outside. Since the ice wall will block the groundwater flow into the buildings, the groundwater level within the ice wall is expected to go down. However, if it becomes lower than the tainted water level, the radioactive water will escape and mix with the underground environment.

“We understand that the biggest concern is that the contaminated water might escape from the buildings. We must not let that happen,” Naohiro Masuda, who heads Tepco’s decommissioning division, said during a news conference on Feb. 25.

Masuda stressed that Tepco will be closely monitoring both water levels and if the groundwater level drops, it will add water from the wells, vowing the tainted water won’t leak “by any chance.”

And even if it leaks, he said Tepco completed the underground sea wall right by the Pacific Ocean, so the tainted groundwater will be blocked there.

“We can promise that it won’t leak to the sea,” he said.

But the Nuclear Regulation Authority, Japan’s nuclear watchdog, has been reluctant to approve Tepco’s ice wall plan. Tepco initially wanted to complete freezing the soil, which will take several months, by the end of March.

After months of explanations, the NRA is expected to green-light the plan soon.

Takasaka, who is a member of an NRA panel monitoring the situation at the Fukushima plant, admits Tepco’s explanation is becoming more convincing but there is no guarantee the tainted water won’t leak.

And if it does, Tepco will face a challenging task of collecting and disposing of radioactive soil, Takasaka claims.

“The underground sea wall will prevent the contamination from spreading into the Pacific. But a massive amount of soil will be tainted and has to be disposed of at some point,” he said.

 

But for the fishing industry in Fukushima Prefecture, the turnaround has been slow, and plagued by the impact of the nuclear disaster that caused massive amounts of radioactive water to flow to the Pacific Ocean.

“I think we are making some progress. The fishermen couldn’t fish for more than a year (after 3/11),” said Yoshihisa Komatsu, deputy director of administration at the Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations. But the speed of the progress “is slow, as it’s been already five years,” he said.

Recovery for Fukushima’s fishing industry has come in small steps. After March 11, 2011, fishermen voluntarily stopped fishing. They resumed in June 2012, although only on a trial basis, and the government slapped an outright ban on the sale of certain species deemed likely to be radioactive.

The blacklist affected more than 35 types of fish caught off the Fukushima coast, which was famous for flounder, angler fish and rockfish.

Under the trial, fishing boats were allowed to catch a small amount of other species but were required to check their radiation levels. If the fish were found to be uncontaminated, they were shipped off to market.

The goal is to see the reaction of consumers, who have largely avoided eating fish from the prefecture due to radiation worries.

The catch has significantly gone down in Fukushima, with only about 5,600 tons of fish caught in 2015, down from about 38,600 tons before 3/11.

To increase the catch, Komatsu said it was essential to lift the shipping ban.

“We can make the first step (toward full recovery) once the ban is lifted from all fish,” said Komatsu.

While the sales ban on several species has been lifted, 28 kinds of fish remain on the list.

Trial fishing, meanwhile, has been expanded from three species to 72.

In addition, radiation-contaminated fish have drastically decreased.

According to the prefecture, about 50 percent of the fish samples tested for radiation levels exceeded the government-designated maximum of 100 becquerels per kilogram right after the nuclear disaster started in 2011. But after April 2015, no fish has exceeded that limit.

As a result, the Fukushima fisheries cooperative federation is now looking to expand the permissible fishing area closer to the Fukushima No. 1 plant.

Currently, fishermen can only fish outside of a 20-km radius of the plant. They want to expand this to a 10-km radius after Tokyo Electric Power Co. last October completed a sea wall that blocks contaminated groundwater from reaching the Pacific. Since then, the level of contamination near the plant has decreased.

While many take this as a positive sign toward recovery, concerns remain.

“If some fish show high levels of contamination, it could hurt efforts to fight the harmful rumors” about the safety of products from the area, Komatsu said.

Fukushima has suffered from a tainted image due to the Fukushima nuclear plant calamity, affecting everything from farm to marine products — something the prefecture has constantly been fighting.

“The harmful rumors need to end to some degree before the trial fishing ends and full-scale fishing resumes,” said Hiromitsu Endo, who represents distributor in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture.

Currently, his association of 28 distributors sell fish caught under the trial to the market.

But once fishing returns to full scale, the association will be disbanded, with each firm left on their own to sell their catch to customers. If the bad image remains, they fear they will have a hard time.

“It will be too late to start fighting the harmful rumors then,” Endo said.

Even five years after the disaster started, the harmful rumors persist, he said.

Although Fukushima Prefecture monitors radiation levels of fish, shipping only products that are not contaminated, distributors said some stores were reluctant to market the products because they didn’t sell well.

To wipe out the bad image, Komatsu of Fukushima fisheries cooperative said the industry needed to keep proving through trial fishing that the fish being sold was safe.

 

The researchers found that at best evacuees could expect to live eight months longer, but that some might gain only one extra day of life. They said this does not warrant ripping people from their homes and communities.

The team of experts from four British universities developed a series of tests to examine the relocations after the Fukushima crisis and earlier Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

After a three-year study, the academics have concluded that Japan “overreacted” by relocating 160,000 residents of Fukushima Prefecture, even though radioactive material fell on more than 30,000 sq. km of territory.

“We judged that no one should have been relocated in Fukushima, and it could be argued this was a knee-jerk reaction,” said Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at Bristol University. “It did more harm than good. An awful lot of disruption has been caused However, this is with hindsight and we are not blaming the authorities.”

The team used a wide range of economic and actuarial data, as well as information from the United Nations and the Japanese government.

In one test, an assessment of judgment value, the researchers calculated how many days of life expectancy were saved by relocating residents away from areas affected by radiation.

They compared this with the cost of relocation and how much this expenditure would impact the quality of people’s lives in the future.

From this information, they were able to work out the optimal or rational level of spending and make a judgment on the best measures to mitigate the effects of a nuclear accident.

Depending on how close people were to the radiation, the team calculated that the relocations added a period of between one day to 21 days to the evacuees’ lives.

But when this was compared with the vast amounts of money spent, the academics came to the conclusion that it was unjustified in all cases.

In some areas, they calculated that 150 times more money was being spent than was judged rational.

Thomas adds, the tests do not take into account the physical and psychological effects of relocating, which have been shown to have led to more than 1,000 deaths among elderly evacuees.

Other studies have also found that once people have lived away for a certain period of time it can become increasingly difficult to persuade them to return.

After Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, around 116,000 people were initially relocated away from the disaster zone.

Looking back on the incident, the team judged it was only worthwhile to relocate 31,000 people because they would have lost in excess of 8.7 months in life expectancy had they remained.

However, for the rest of the 116,000 people, it would have been a more rational decision to keep them where they were, given that their average loss of life was put at three months.

Four years later, a further 220,000 people were relocated from areas close to Chernobyl. Researchers found this unjustified.

Thomas says the loss in life expectancy following a nuclear accident has to be put into context alongside other threats all people face.

For example, it has been claimed that the average Londoner will lose about 4½ months in life expectancy due to high pollution levels.

Thomas concludes governments should carry out a more careful assessment before mounting a relocation operation of at least a year. A temporary evacuation could be a good idea while authorities work out the risk from radiation, he said.

In the future, Thomas would like to see more real-time information made available to the public on radiation levels in order to avoid hysteria and bad planning.

On a plus note, the team found that other remedial measures — decontaminating homes, deep ploughing of soil and bans on the sales of certain food products — were far more effective.

Thomas has already discussed his findings with colleagues at the University of Tokyo and he is keen that his findings can help better quantify the risks from radioactive leaks.

The project was sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Britain’s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. It was intended to give advice for nuclear planners both in Britain and India.

The research team comprised specialists from City University in London, Manchester University, the Open University and Warwick University.

 

For more information on the festival, visit jtim.es/ZeZ2O